Archive for the ‘Don Butler’ tag

Like two ships passing in the night, the eras of the wood-bodied station wagon and the step-down Hudson just barely overlapped. While the latter grabbed headlines with its unitized perimeter chassis when introduced in 1948, the former found itself being phased out with less expensive and less maintenance-intensive steel-bodied station wagons starting in about 1949. It’s no surprise then that Hudson never built a step-down woodie station wagon, yet we see one listed to cross the block at RM’s auction at St. John’s next month.

One of the more revolutionary post-war American automobile designs, the step-down Hudson used that unitized chassis to sit lower than any of its competitors, and it would later combine that low center of gravity with its potent Twin-H six-cylinder engine to briefly dominate stock car racing, but Hudson only ever offered the step-down cars in sedan, coupe, and convertible body styles. Don Butler, a designer at Hudson after World War II, envisioned other body styles – pickup, town car, and station wagon – but Hudson didn’t express any interest in his designs, so Butler stashed away his sketches and didn’t show them to anybody else until he published his Crestline book on Hudson in 1982 and included the sketches within.

Bill Eggert, one of the many Hudson enthusiasts who saw those sketches and wondered what a woodie step-down would look like in real life, decided to actually build such a car, starting with a rust-free 1948 Hudson Commodore Eight four-door sedan. To it he added a rear roof section from a 1954 Hudson and completely hand-built wooden body using ash framing and mahogany veneer, the latter applied over the existing sheetmetal below the beltline. He treated the rest of the car to an exceptional restoration to make it appear as though Hudson very well could have built a woodie step-down had it decided to go along with Butler’s sketches and debuted the woodie in 2007 at the Hudson Essex Terraplane Club’s national meet in Auburn, Indiana.

According to RM, it has been shown just one other time since then and has recently been treated to a mechanical and cosmetic refresh. RM’s pre-auction estimate of the woodie ranges from $150,000 to $200,000.